Most of us think that the only people who care about climate change are the “educated coastal elite” and the like– people who have a lot of climate literacy. But climate anxiety shows up in a variety of ways in a much wider political range of people than you might think.
In this episode, longtime activist, clinical therapist, and co-director of the Climate Psychology Alliance Rebecca Weston and I explore how one’s politics, race, gender, geographical location, and class shape our climate emotions. How does climate anxiety show up in farmers, leaders of the far right, or in communities that have been navigating collective trauma long before climate change became a salient threat? How does your identity determine how you perceive, experience, and express distress about climate change? How can psychology help us heal these broader, political conflicts, and thereby get us closer to climate justice?
Shownotes
- Climate Psychology Alliance of North America
- Rebecca Weston’s LinkedIn page
- DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
- Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein piece on the “Rise of End-Times Fascism”
- Sally Weintrobe’s essay on “Noah’s Arkism”
- Essay on tech bros written by Ginie Servant-Miklos (not by me)
- CPA Webinar on Unnaming Climate: Authoritarianism, Collective Trauma, and Imperfect Solidarity with me, Joe Henderson, Finn Does, and Rebecca Weston
- Billings Gazette piece on farmers’ mental health and climate change (and another open-access essay on this topic)
- Jennifer Ladino on climate emotions in Idaho
- Buffalo shooting and the “great replacement theory”
- “When Climate Anxiety Leans Right: Ecofascism, Buffalo, and Roe” Webinar with Rebecca Weston, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Betsy Hartmann, Jade Sasser, and Blanche Verlie, hosted by the Climate Psychology Alliance
- An article with an interview with me about “Climate Anxiety Has a Whiteness Problem”
- Dana Fisher on Climate Magic
- A show with Amy Westervelt that touches on her analysis of the intersectional politics of climate worry
Transcript
WESTON: There is an active cultivation of disinformation turning into misinformation. And so when we think about what happened to the LA fires, when people are not given real information, people are going to be the most vulnerable that they've ever been. That is not going to be the moment where they reach for understandings that threaten their identity.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we talk about the relationship between climate change and our hearts and minds. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt and fellow climate despairing human.
I cannot tell you how many of my students have told me stories of being in therapy, sharing their worries about climate change, and hearing that those worries are foolish, that they can't do anything about it, so they shouldn't even worry. And they need to stop reading the news and that they care too much.
Bringing up climate anxiety in a therapy room can feel really scary, since therapists are rarely trained or equipped to support clients in this way, and clients may feel like this isn't the right place to talk about those worries.
Enter climate aware therapy, an emerging response to this gap. Today's episode is about how climate change shows up in the therapy room, and whether therapy is the right tool in the first place for the job of dealing with this newish thing called climate distress.
I'm speaking with Rebecca Weston, co-executive director of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, an organization that has led the charge on building a network of climate aware therapists, which has supported efforts to train therapists in this field and has even redefined therapy to meet this unique moment of climate change.
Rebecca herself is a psychotherapist, a photographer, and an activist living in metro New York. In her clinical practice, her work is informed by a recognition that our sense of self, our sense of connection and our sense of capacity are powerfully influenced by both internal and systemic aspects of our lives. She has expertise in attachment and trauma, and as a long time social activist with deep roots in clinical practice, Rebecca's approach to alleviating human suffering is both private and systemic. As you'll see in our conversation, the change we need is at once individual and collective.
This conversation helped me think about the many ways climate anxiety shows up in different people, depending on their identity and relationship to power, and privilege, and why that's important to understand. We got heavy.
Let's dive into this episode on the politics of climate therapy with Rebecca Weston.
Welcome to the show, Rebecca.
WESTON: Thank you. So good to hear you and see you.
RAY: I'm so excited to have you on the show. You are a therapist, a practicing therapist, and you are really focused on climate change. And I'm just curious, just to get us warmed up. What happens in the therapy room? I mean, bring us into the actual room itself. What is happening in the therapy room? How are people presenting? As if you will. Around climate emotions. And how does climate change show up in your office?
WESTON: Oh, really good question. And in, I would say two different categories. One is where people make it very explicit that's why they want to see me. And I have several clients who came to see me because they are either climate activists or they have found themselves preoccupied to a point where they're distracted and unable to focus on other things in their day about climate distress.
Others, for example, are worried about whether or not to have children. And that has certainly come up quite a bit in my work. Others have wondered about whether they should change their jobs because it's complicit in their minds with climate change. So there is a whole category of people who are very mindful and thinking a great deal about climate, whether as an activist or in their livelihoods and in the world.
There's a whole other sector who barely talk about it at all. Or don't. And given that I know that climate change is on huge numbers of people's minds, the issue of how they avoid talking about climate change also shows up in this space. And for clinicians, that's an incredibly complicated question. Do we initiate conversation about things that people are afraid to talk about? How do we signal that we're open to it without being suggestive? How do we bring in something new to a space that historically people haven't necessarily felt comfortable bringing in?
So there's a lot of different ways to think about it, where it's explicit and where it might be implicit and not brought up.
RAY: So these are two different ways that climate anxiety is showing up in sort of a very explicit way where people are naming it. And then secondarily a way where people are really not naming it. And you sort of think it's there anyway, right? It feels like it might be there in kind of a denial or avoidance way. And it's a clinician ethical question about whether to raise it. That's fascinating.
So one of the ways I imagine an audience might want to think about oh there's a therapist in the room. Let's get some help on this. So what do you do with these clients who bring it up explicitly?
WESTON: That’s what’s so interesting about climate anxiety. There's a lot of different parts that make it so fascinating. But one part of it is that it's very different from other types of anxiety, in the sense that I'm not invested in discouraging them from being anxious. If anything, I want to validate that anxiety, and I don't necessarily want to suggest that it's an easy thing to resolve or that it can be resolved within the confines of their own individual experience.
So what I often try to do instead is talk with them about ways in which this anxiety connects to other feelings of hopelessness, other feelings of helplessness, relationships from which they can draw support and care. And so I put it into a larger context of how to receive and care for each other as we try to move through this world that is producing very stressful situations for people.
So the biggest part is that I'm not trying to get rid of the anxiety. I'm trying to normalize it. And then I'm also trying to encourage them to think that the solution is not just within themselves to just put up with it or find only sort of internal mechanisms to deal with it, but to engage in the world and to engage in their relationships around the questions that matter the most to them. And that, interestingly, brings out whole histories about their relationship to trusting themselves, trusting a movement, trusting caregivers.
So if they come with a feeling that they trust in the world and their ability to get help and to give help and care that it often ends up tapping into those larger systems where they can learn how to see this anxiety is another part of what they're offering to the world and needing care for it. So it actually ends up interacting with other parts of their own personal history, other parts of their own attachment history, other parts of their own trauma history.
So it's both very, very general validating the anxiety and also very specific in terms of how they historically have handled issues of profound stress and distress in their relationships and in their world.
RAY: That must be difficult to not want to fix people.
WESTON: It is. Although I think when people bring up climate anxiety in the room, they have already gotten to a place where they wouldn't believe me, even if I tried. And I think in some ways, not taking that approach is its own sort of relief to people that they're not crazy, that they're not exaggerating the problem, that they are, in fact, in this with me and I'm with them. So I think part of the issue is that they feel as if am I crazy that this is so scary? Yes. We all at some level want relief from scary things, but I think at a deeper, deeper relational and existential place, we want a sense that we are in this together and that we are understood and that we are. We're not making it up.
And so I think that the much deeper validation that this is a profound thing, that it's a very scary thing, actually, ironically, creates a sense of safety to feel what one feels. And then in relationship that can say, we can hold this together. It's very different from the idea that we need to fix it. And I don't I mean, the kind of clinician that I am does not actually believe a whole lot in quick fixes to these things. And I believe deeply in the power of relationship to hold and contain. So it's in sync with my work.
But I have also felt, at least with my clients, that they want that deeper sense of connection. Yes. What you're feeling is real. How do we do all this together? I'm in this with you. And that's a much deeper sense of resolution and care than a kind of quick fix. And that's incredibly rewarding.
RAY: Yeah, I'm interested that your clients don't necessarily want fixing because if I felt such discomfort and I went to the therapy room, I would be thinking, just relieve me from this.
WESTON: Relief in the presence of someone else.
RAY: Yeah.
WESTON: That's right. That's what the relief comes from.
RAY: That's so beautiful. Thank you for that invitation already right out the gates here to think of climate anxiety, unlike other kinds of anxiety, as something that we might not want to seek relief from. In the, in that sort of traditional way.
Which leads me to this question of, you know, are there limitations, the way that we typically think about therapy and the therapist client relationship? Are there things that climate change asks differently of that relationship? Are there things that climate change says, the mental health kind of therapy model that everyone thinks of when they think about, oh, if I have some trouble, I can go to a therapist and they can help me work through it. Is that model not relevant to the climate sphere? To climate change as a problem? How is it similar? How is it different?
WESTON: I've had a problem with that model ever since I've been a clinician. And that's before I was aware of climate change even in that. I think that particularly in postwar US, therapy has often been highly, highly individualized and highly sort of focused on internal senses of conflict.
But there have been people forever who have been trying to change that focus within the mental health field, and to talk a great deal about the relationship between external systems and oppression and capitalism and racism, for example, how that does impact our internal senses of self. And so there's been tensions within the field forever trying to talk about the social and political context of an individual experience. And so on the one hand, this isn't new at all.
So for people who have been struggling and fighting against racism or working in communities that are dealing with police brutality or chronic poverty, it's impossible to not talk about larger systemic issues. Or if you do, there's a whole lot of problem with that, right? When we think about the ways the larger social and political world impacts people's sense of experience and what they can do in the world.
On the other hand for climate change, there are still also differences. And one major one is the scale, the absolute scale and the complete ubiquitousness of who is going to be impacted by climate change. It is going to impact all of us in different ways, in different scales. And there's time constraints that are exceedingly real in terms of how much we can do and how quickly to address the very, very real massive catastrophes. Right.
And so I think that the press of that changes the sense of urgency. It changes the sense of the therapeutic space. It changes even the way a clinician might feel in terms of facing their own dread about it. Is this, in fact, something that can be solved? And so that in that therapy space, when even when we think about it individually, those pressures are very, very different. I would also say there has also always been a tension between an individual focus and community focus. Right? There used to be a thriving community mental health field that's practically destroyed over the last several generations or decades. I would say that this begs the question about whether or not an individual model can remotely solve the crisis, whether it can remotely sort of connect to the volumes of people who are experiencing it. And it needs community solutions. It's not an individual solution. And the relief for it can't be an individual one.
So I think that also makes it quite different and in some ways the same with other systemic issues.
RAY: Yeah. Yeah. Just turned to this sort of tension you describe. And in the mental health universe and psychology universe between, is this an individual thing, an inner, you know, some inner struggle thing or that therefore you can adjust yourself to reality in a way that reduces your suffering. Versus this is actually reality causing the suffering. This kind of like the, you know, Krishnamurti quote that I always mangle. You know, “there's no such thing as being healthy in a sick society” or whatever. Right? That this kind of, Okay, so how do we if it's true that it is no way to be healthy in a sick society and your job is mental health, right? Your job is to try to provide something akin to well-being or health.
But you are not there. Also challenging the society to be better so that mental health is therefore conditioned. The conditions for mental health are better. That must feel very restricting, right? Like what you're operating with in an individualistic therapy model is just simply the tools. Tools are just not there. It's just that's not the arena of change that needs to happen. Does that make you wonder whether therapy is an outdated model for these systemic, big scale problems, such as climate change? Or is there still a role for therapy here?
WESTON: Oh, that's such a good question. I think that there's always a role for therapy, because
I think there's always a role for the healing experience of relationship. And in our society that often comes in the form of therapy. Do I think that's the only form it needs to take in a kind of clinical professional model? Not necessarily. I think that there's also spiritual models for that. I think there's also peer models for that. So on the one hand, there are there's a specific role for clinicians because that's the role that we have in our society. We've assigned that role to this kind of worker.
But I think that role in terms of that need to be seen and felt and heard at an individual level in a space of intimacy and understanding, is there all the time. And I think that it's essential to anybody's healing is to have that kind of space. But I realize that also takes sort of, it puts the DSM and the ways we think about mental illness in kind of a different way. I'm not talking about it in the in the more sort of the diagnostic categories where people are dealing with psychosis or people are dealing with sort of biological mood disorders and things like that, I'm dealing much more with the kind of relational world where those kinds of things, which I think is what the majority of people are thinking about when they think of, of therapy.
RAY: The DSM being the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, that is really the thing that drives whether or not insurance will cover this thing. And. Right, so like the way that the mental health gets systematized in a structure to be supported or resourced or, you know, people having training being funded through their training is really dictated by the DSM. Am I right about that?
WESTON: Yeah. When we think about is therapy outdated, I come from a very specific tradition and I come from a very specific way of thinking about it, and that is that we can't really separate the relational world that we live in all the time from the larger social, political world. And so I don't think it's really either or. I think it's both and it's always both, and that we really need to have relationships in our world that sustain us, that see us, that give us permission to feel and give us permission to name what we're going through and to do that in a larger system, I think is always necessary. It's not a substitute, but it's necessary. I also happen to think that participating in larger collective struggles opens up capacities within us as individuals that are really different and that are not available in individual therapy. So I think also collective work, collective struggle is its own therapeutic. One can get one's therapeutic experience out of that, even if that's not the goal. So again, I don't think it's either/or, I think it's both/and.
RAY: Your experience of saying, you know, you can't separate these things and the sort of false separation of what's happening in your interior world versus what's happening in the political world. It has been a disservice to the therapy model. So this leads me to this question of, you were trained as a therapist. You're trained as a clinician does, you know, does your training. It was a clip you for all of this or have you had to learn things anew? Have you had to learn new things? And where are you learning those things? If so.
WESTON: No, I don't think that our training has, I don't think most training equips people for this.
RAY: I know getting a PhD didn't equip me for it.
WESTON: Yeah, no, I don't think the vast majority of clinical programs remotely focus on even the concept of a dialectic, which is that there is both an individual experience and a collective one, and they interact and they, they, they co-create. At some level, it's very, very, very much around that. There's an individual who is then impacted by the outside world in a kind of categorical way. Again, either or in some ways, rather than really understanding the ways in which we as people and individuals become who we are in a social and political and environmental world. Right. And something that you and I've talked about before is that people emerge within history. They're not separate from history. So how do we understand that? Does that mean that we ignore individual specificity? Of course not. We are living, feeling sentient beings who love and need and care.
But that doesn't mean that we are completely separate from those larger systems and that we need to understand those interactions. But school does not teach us that. That's too radical, ultimately. And we don't get that. I come from that because I started out actually as an activist. I didn't start out as a clinician. I started out thinking in terms of collective struggle, and I learned that history. I sort it out on my own to find that history. And I actually found that there was something lacking in that, in those most in those movements, and that was an attention to the individual attention to the relational attention to the experience that people are feeling with, with the burnout or even the broader levels of kind of sense of self that can emerge in a collective space. Right?
So I feel like I was lucky that I started my work in the other direction. And so it is very much when I, when I think about the Climate Psychology Alliance, for example, which is an organization. And part of that, that I'm working hard to sort of bring those two together in a way that there is an absolute need, again, for the therapeutic, the relational, the individual. I don't think we're going to not need that. How do we merge that with and understand that with and how do we repurpose those skills in other ways that can be used not only for the climate movement, but potentially in a community way, in a mutual aid kind of way, in a way that brings in those questions again, not necessarily new, as I've mentioned, but in the context of this current moment where climate distress and climate change, is one of the key issues of our world.
RAY: So one of the things I'm hearing you say is that climate change is asking from practitioners that the individualistic model of therapy isn't going to really be the best one all the time. Everywhere is still needed. But, you know, it's not the only model that needs to be expanded, that this is a collective problem and that you know, the individual work is just, has limitations. And I would also say that it sounds to me like what you're also saying is that the therapy model has been really only accessible to and typically is one of the sort of, in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs kind of thing, which I know has problems and everything. But, you know, access to the kind of mental health well-being tools that therapy often offers has been kind of a rarefied privilege. Right? Like it's not really accessible to a lot of communities.
So much to the point where I think some communities, deal with it by just sort of saying, that is not something we need. And I would say that, you're what you're trying to do by mirroring not just the social activism and the therapy and saying, therefore, let's, let's break down the individual collective binary a little bit more.
But you're also saying, let's make this an equity issue, right? Like this is a justice issue that people ought to be, you know, people ought to have access to these mental health resources who are in the front lines of the worst things that are happening around climate change, not just the people who are already the most insulated.
So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about how therapy might be more available to people who are actually not as impacted, even if they have a lot of dread and anxiety about it? And, and what you're trying to do, the Climate Psychology Alliance is sort of, narrow that gap a little bit, make this stuff more accessible to the people who are most affected by it. Am I understanding Climate Psychology Alliance a little bit, right? Or. Yeah, just a little bit about that.
WESTON: Yes. And I actually in response to some of what you're saying I have, I have some other thoughts and that is, I really also take quite seriously that therapy can take many, many, many different forms. And I absolutely think that the U.S individualist mental health system is profoundly and equitably distributed, both by insurance companies, by who accesses it, by who gets trained, who has access to the resources to go into programs, who becomes mental health clinicians. It is a very white sort of it's a very white gendered cis female kind of profession. Absolutely. So and I agree with all of those things. And then if you don't have insurance, it's hard to access. They don't reward group models. They don't think you can. I mean, there's many, many, many ways in which it's very, very limited. And I can speak a lot about that limitation.
But I also don't want to make it sound as if people don't have access to that care, that there aren't other models in the world where people are caring for each other. And so that's why I really think so. I was talking to a climate journalist who's become a good friend. She can't currently actually access therapy for various reasons, but she has a group chat with dear friends who understand what it means to be a woman of color. As a journalist writing in this moment.
And there's their own peer model of care, or people go to their neighbors. People have always sought each other out to find care and understanding and support. And I don't want to assume that if you don't have access to a professional PhD person providing that care, that you're not part of a community that's providing care for itself or figuring out other models. I just don't want to fetishize this particular form of mental health care, which is why I think we need to actually be open to imagining, how do we resource our skills in all sorts of different ways that may break out of the individualist model, may break out of the professional model? Even so, that, I guess, is an assumption. I wanted to just interrupt there for a moment.
RAY: Yeah, I love that. And I love the fact that therefore also opens up accessibility and democratizes this resource. You know, one of the things I go on the road and talk about a lot to try to train other teachers is how to bring students' emotional lives into the center of environmental and climate education spaces. And the pushback I get from many teachers is I'm not a therapist. I'm scared of that. I don't want to do that. And so this kind of like, we kind of need this rejection of the professional model of this. We need to think about all of the ways that our mental health is all of our responsibilities. Right? And that people's emotional lives are always, already, always there everywhere we go. They don't just get compartmentalized into private spaces. And so that the notion that we could all be useful in this and not just have it be something you go to a professional for, I think is absolutely beautiful, maps onto my own work and thinking about what an educator's role is.
So I really love that push back and I appreciate it. You know, you are very much part of the co-founding kind of original, you know, brains behind and effort and labor and elbow grease behind this organization called the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. I know it's an extension of a UK based original Climate Psychology Alliance. And I'm curious what, just give us a little bit of background about what this organization is, what gap it is trying to fill and what it is responding to. And, and you have talked to me in the past about how it's responding to our unique moment in the last year or so. You know, what is what is Climate Psychology Alliance about right now?
WESTON: I do feel like I want to share a little bit about its history, although I'm terrible at dates. But I think it's really important to acknowledge the people who really began thinking about this field, in a way that was moving.
So the environmental and the climate movement often was preoccupied with questions about behaviorism. How can we get people to recycle more? How can we get people to drive less? How could we get people to pick up public transportation, purchased different things. And it was a very behaviorist kind of question about human beings relationship to the environment. And there are some incredibly important people Renée Lertzman comes to mind. Elizabeth Allured read comes to mind a number of different writers in the US come to mind who have really, really, really contributed very important sorts of nonbehaviorist, approaches to the human psyche and its relationship to existential threat, its relationship to the non-human world. There's so much that this that the founders of this field have brought, has moved the whole question away from the behaviorist model into the psychological and the larger ecosystem in which human beings find themselves, and that I really have a huge debt to those people. And I think Climate Psychology Alliance started from that sort of, beginning where.
RAY: I just was, can I make sure I understand what you mean by behaviorist model for somebody who might not be in the field, right? Yeah. No, it's okay, because I, I remember a moment in graduate school when somebody I was in graduate school with was getting a conservation psychology degree, and the premise of their entire work was, I think what you're describing is behavior as, which is, how do we get how do we work with people psychology to get people to do things that we predict preprescribe as good for the environment.
So what they call pro-environmental behavior PEB. Am I understanding you correctly that the behaviorist model that we've moved past? It was just concerned with those kinds of questions like persuasion and getting people's behavior to change to be more environmental? Okay, okay.
WESTON: So some of the people I name and more of them, many in the in the UK as well, really tried to bring what I think is the richness of depth psychology to the question, what does it mean to feel internal conflict? What does it mean to feel ambivalence? What does it mean to feel a sense of identity threat? How do we separate and from or understand our attachment to the more than human world? All of those different kinds of questions, which I think really are essential.
RAY: They're way beyond, how do I get this person to recycle more?
WESTON: Yeah, absolutely. Well, beyond that, add to either absolutely essential questions. When I think about how do we understand existential threat, how do we understand climate change, which can look far away if we've not experienced extreme weather in our own lives, helps us understand? What does it mean to have such a destroyed and destructive and extraction or kind of relationship to the Earth and all of those other kinds of things that underlie some of this stuff?
So I think that the depth psychology approach is really, really essential. And that's where it started. And there were very key people who got together and wrote really, really important pieces of writing about that, discussed it. What they didn't necessarily have is what I found myself bringing was, if you all think you're interested in this, I could bet every other mental health clinician who's seeing what's happening in the world is interested in this, too. How do we make this wider spread? How do we actually engage the entire mental health field around these questions?
And so again, I brought a kind of activist energy to that question. If I'm feeling these things, if other people are feeling these things, surely we're not alone. And so Climate Psychology Alliance was held together in really, really important theoretical ways for quite a while by those people when the words climate anxiety started hitting the news, I would say around five years ago, right around Covid, CPA also exploded and all of a sudden it was everywhere in the news. And so then we had to relate to the question a little bit differently.
This is no longer just a kind of I don't even mean me to disparage it. It was no longer something that we were thinking about in the abstract, that something that might become relevant to the field if we could convince people over time, it actually sort of, sort of flooded us with an awareness that we very quickly are relevant and need to figure out how to support a growing and reckoning. Or as someone who would. The bubble is breaking. People are beginning to feel the anxiety of climate change in a different way, and CPA had to rise to that challenge. And that's where we're at today.
RAY: I want to shift gears a little bit and ask you something that you and I talk about a lot. This is getting those are all kind of softball questions. We're going to, we're going to go, we're going to get a little wild now. Okay. You're right. This is right. This is where I expect you will really light up. Because I know for in the past for, this is one of your favorite things to really get your teeth. So okay, so is the political right in this country also worried about climate change?
WESTON: So you just pivoted.
RAY: That was a big debate. You know, do they have climate anxiety? Why do they not want to talk about climate? How do they express their climate anxiety if they do have climate anxiety and why aren't they talking about it all? Everybody wants to know. Yeah.
WESTON: So I would first distinguish between leadership of the far right politically. So in terms of political leaders, in the far right, and I think we can all name names in that regard, from people who identify with the far right, which is why I think even the framing disinformation is really different from misinformation, right? That there are people who are purposely purveyors of disinformation. And we, and Amy Westervelt to work is so essential in that in terms of really identifying the ways in which people purposely get false information out there about the fossil fuel industry and about climate change and the pace of climate change and the urgency and such. I do distinguish between people who I would think who in fact, are malignantly motivated to discourage people from thinking about climate change and that is a different group of people from people who receive those ideas, are living their lives and find themselves believing them or are vulnerable to those lies for complex reasons. Even if they identify with the right, I don't think that those are the same groups of people. Sure.
RAY: Yeah. And one has a real intention, intentionality of an agenda, and one is just trying to live their life and bumping up against misinformation and trying to make sense of it. Yeah. Great. Yeah.
WESTON: Trying to make sense of the world like everybody else, with all of the mixed ideas and biases and, complications of what it means to live in a multiracial, capitalist society. All of those different kinds of things. So do I think that the leadership of the far right has climate anxiety? I don't know if I would frame it as climate anxiety, but they damn well know about climate change. They would not be pursuing the vast majority of policies that they are pursuing if they didn't know about climate change.
RAY: Let's talk about that. What do you mean by that? Why would the policies they're seeking have anything to do with their climate literacy? Right. The far right I mean, one of the things I found interesting, I read an article recently about how deeply I think it was the Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein piece. I'll put it in our show notes.
But these leaders that you just mentioned, distinguishing in this bucket of leaders are actually highly climate literate, which maybe comes as a surprise to some listeners. So yeah. How does that then connect the dots between their climate literacy and their worry about their acceptance that climate change is happening? Right? Even if they don't say that out loud with what their policy proposals might be.
WESTON: So Sally Weintraub is somebody who writes a lot about climate change and what she would describe as neoliberalism. And she has a phrase called “arkism” within that which she uses to talk about sort of how when there gets to be a perception of growing scarcity of resources and growing control over resources, and I mean chemical resources, I mean water resources, I mean food resources, I mean resources, namely profit and all of the other kinds of things. When you think about resources, when people realize that is coming under threat there, they're going to be people who want to hoard, right? And who are going to want to hoard not only for themselves, but for their class of people.
And I think about tech bros, and I know you've just recently written something about tech bros, and I want to bring that in here, too. Right. That I think that there's an entire class of people who are reading the writing on the wall quite correctly, actually, that there is going to be profound social distrust, unrest. There's going to be profound food scarcities, there's going to be refugee crises all over the place. And they want to make sure that they're not the ones who are going to bear the brunt of that. They want to hoard resources, they want to hoard decision making. They want to protect their wealth. They want to protect access. And to do that, it has to be fundamentally anti-democratic, and it has to be fundamentally unequal, and it has to fundamentally deflect from a huge number of other sorts of preoccupations.
And so, yes, I think that they are very aware of climate change, and I think that they want to make as much profit as they possibly can, and then they want to hoard the resources. It's as grotesque as that. In my humble opinion, that's a different question from the people who don't think in those terms and who, in fact, are listening to the disinformation that it's not about climate change, it's more about immigration or it's more about other things. What do we do with the people who experience climate change but don't frame it that way? Or I guess your question is, are they experiencing climate change? And are they experiencing climate distress? And I would say, absolutely they are.
But if we frame it in those terms, they wouldn't necessarily recognize it and in fact would probably sort of push against it in a lot of ways. And that's a huge challenge. And I know a number of people who are trying to work on that challenge. How often do we name climate? You and I have talked about, do we unname climate? What's the importance of naming it? What's the distraction of naming it? What are we trying to get at when we talk about that? Is that just an elitist kind of approach? Tried to hammer it into people's heads or is it actually placating the right if we don't name it right? These are really, really hard questions, and I don't think that there's no one consistent answer to that at all.
But I will say, and I think I've shared this with you before, it's a story that I think is absolutely emblematic. It was a story in the Billings Gazette. I think I did mention this to you about farmers in Montana, another sort of call out about climate journalists and the sophistication that we need for climate journalism. But so there was a journalist who was documenting in Montana the escalating suicide rates among Montana farmers and ranchers and the incredible sort of vice that these farmers were in is that they could not name climate change as being something real, because that absolutely threatened their sense of group identity and political beliefs that kept them safe and secure, and at least a feeling that I am among people that understand me and I understand them right. Deeply, deeply important feelings in an insecure world, they could not acknowledge climate change. They also could barely acknowledge mental health as a struggle. And yet they were actually experiencing the extreme chaos of weather systems where they could not plan ahead. They could not plan how much they were going to need to order. They could not plan crop failure, they could not plan a whole lot of stuff. And so their own sort of attachment to being capable farmers, able to deal with uncertainty, was under profound threat. And they couldn't talk about it, so they couldn't talk about mental health, they couldn't talk about climate change.
So where do they go? How do they address what they're feeling? They don't. And so the suicide rate has been escalating, feeling like their personal failures that they're, they're abandoning what they're doing, for their families, they're, they're letting go of the family farm. All of those difficult things. How do we reach those people? I would call that climate distress. Absolutely. But it's also something else.
RAY: So what it does for me as a person who is, you know, fairly squarely on the left, but also really, really interested in building bridges and figuring out how to talk to each other. It creates in me an incredible amount of compassion. Despite the pushback you described of wanting to name climate change and a recognition that the very act of doing that I mean, when I talked to my, my Idaho person who writes the most interesting stuff that I know of around climate emotions in Idaho Red state, you know, she talks about, the fact that most people the problem with climate change is that it has been conflated with in the discourse from the right, conflated with government regulation, and that has been the great success of the right to get it unnamed. And, you know, the compassion I feel. Oh, that has been a narrative that we might need to with good journalism, like you said, might need to tease apart a little bit so that climate change can be now squarely identified with those economic insecurities you just described, rather than with government regulation. Right?
So there's a narrative challenge here that can help people, alleviate their distress, which is the punch line. Right? Like, this is the point of our even us having this conversation. Like, where is that distress and how do we alleviate it so that they can, first of all, stay alive, you know, and secondly, you know, adapt or whatever it is that the in the climate realm, there's a lot of tools for people talking about this, and they don't really have access to those conversations. Right.
So yeah, thank you for that very much. The result for me is, this greater compassion. For, for folks who might reject the word but who are really sparing and saying suffering. We've done a number of webinar events for the Climate Psychology Alliance together, which has been really fun and I'm just grateful to be in that community because I'm not a practitioner and I'm learning so much from all these practitioners.
One of them that we did was called When Climate Anxiety Leans Right. So similar to what we were just talking about. And it was following the mass shootings that had happened in Buffalo, which for folks who might not remember what that was about. The shooter actually cited as the reason for his shooting of a lot of people of color was because of what he called the great replacement theory. And I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about what you saw as the need for that webinar? You know what? We're what was the intervention there about trying to identify climate anxiety and how it shows up in violence? You know what? Why did we do that? And, what is the connection between climate anxiety and something like the great replacement theory or this, like, violence that's happening, particularly targeting people of color?
WESTON: At the tail end of our podcast,
RAY: Are you saying you want to talk about that for a long time?
WESTON: Hours and hours and hours.
WESTON: It takes a couple of steps to talk about it, but I think , at the time you and Jade Sasser, gave a really important voice to some of the pieces of it, which is that especially in some incarnations of the environmental movement, there is a whole right wing take within the environmental movement. It can be very misanthropic, for one, that human beings are the problem. And not that we have a relationship with the environment, that the humans are destroying the environment, and it's not a dialectic is certainly one part, but
I think that there has also always been a kind of population control language around that within the environmental movement. And the moment you start talking about population control and overpopulation as being the source of the problem, you immediately like pretty much you cannot have the conversation without it also having all sorts of implications about, well, who's who is over populating the planet. Where do they live, what color are they, where they moving to all of those other different kinds of questions? And who has a right to the land? Who has the right to reproduce and who doesn't? And is it really the people who are the problem, or the systems in which people are living and who has access to food security? Who is responsible for the majority of the emissions, etc., etc., etc..
So that talk or that webinar was a response to what we, I think collectively are seeing, and it's only playing out much more dramatically now that there's tendencies within even the sort of self-care and in the environmental movement to focus on the wrong problem, and the wrong problem being people of color, the wrong problem being those people coming in and taking what's ours. And when that it's back to sort of what we're saying with Sally Weintraub, it's like when there's a feeling of scarcity and a feeling of threat and insecurity, people hoard as opposed to thinking about collective and solidarity. We're in this together and experiencing this differently. And in that process, they find ways and reasons why they should get it and not others. And that becomes the development of racist ideas and the great replacement ideas. How do we explain why they shouldn't get it? Well, of course they're immigrants. That's why they shouldn't get it. Or they weren't originally here. And they forget the Native Americans who were originally here, all of those other kinds of things. And so the great replacement theory is a way of trying to justify hoarding resources unto themselves to address what they perceive is an unfair allocation, and their own insecurity is how I perceive it.
RAY: Yeah. And the great replacement theory, just for folks who aren't familiar with that, came what has always been around in kind of Malthusian ideas since the 18th century, but it has to do with the 2010, I believe. I think it was a 2010 census that came out. That's the where folks were saying for the first time in 2050, we predict that, white people would be outnumbered by nonwhite people. And so that became taken up by folks who are anxious about national identity, and how race plays into national identity. That got taken up as something called the Great replacement theory. There's going to be a replacement, a great replacement of white people. And so the Buffalo shooting was directly a reaction to that. And, you know, what does the environment or climate change have to do with all that? You've just beautifully spilled out and wanting to name that big climate emotions can shape really beautiful actions and solidarity and leaning into community and building resilience and taking action and going against the grain and challenging the ways and systems are all about profit and extraction and mostly like you described, what happens in your therapy room. Mostly we sort of embrace climate anxiety as the root of some good things that could happen and figure out how to harness that and how to direct that.
But occasionally and not, well, not so occasionally, but there is a very strong, long standing strand of how environmental emotions or climate emotions can actually lead towards really regressive violent behavior and actions and, and have roots even in like Nazi Germany and, and all kinds of other examples of, using the environment or the idea of protecting nature as an excuse to be really bad things to different populations. So thank you. Yeah, we're really in it now.
WESTON: So I guess I would say, that I think it's again important to underline and you asked where is right now and other is, is, is that's only gotten far worse, obviously, as we think about now. And we think about the current administration's attack on local radio stations and attacks on climate science and attacks on all sorts of things related. Not only to climate specifically, but to science more generally and to, local resources and local knowledge and weather, sort of weather reports and all of those other things that there's, again, there's an active cultivation of disinformation turning into misinformation. And so when we think about what happened to the LA fires, so we think about some of the stories that came out of Hurricane Helene, or we think about some of the stuff that happened in Texas when people are not given real information and given access to real supportive care about what's happening in their lives, people are going to be the most vulnerable that they've ever been. That is not going to be the moment where they reach for understandings that threaten their identity. Far from it.
And so the far right is absolutely invested, in my view, in disseminating and mis-educating people. That will only increase the likelihood that people fall into some of their more narrow understandings to protect their sense of identity. It's most insecure. And so I think all of these things are profoundly related. And so again, sort of what is the role of CPA or the climate and mental health movement in general is really tried to address at the locations where it's happening this distress and try to provide in community and in a collective space, alternative ways of understanding what's happening to people, because the propensity for them to fall into right wing narratives is much, much higher when people are profoundly vulnerable and alienated from the resources that can get help.
So these are all very, very related issues. And I think it's even worse than when you and I did that back in, in right after the Buffalo killings.
RAY: Yeah. What you just pointed out, I hadn't really thought about that connection that if we don't, if we don't give mental health resources to people who are feeling particularly victimized in those moments of vulnerability and therefore become, they're that much more vulnerable to disinformation, that can just perpetuate the cycle. And so we don't just need to provide mental health because we want people to feel better. We have to provide mental health so we can stem more cycles of violence. So yeah, I hadn't really put that together in that particular way. I really appreciate that. I will ask, just one last question about, you know, one small little question that, doesn't that doesn't take a lot of time to answer, which is, I'm being sarcastic. Yeah. I have a I just want to make sure, in case, you know, you never know, an audio that can come across.
So I'm just I'm going to flag it right there. I'm being sarcastic. So you know, one of the things I find super, I've been thinking about this for a long time. And this is also how Jade Sasser and I got really connected to and thinking about climate emotions as a question of justice and identity.
But I'm curious what, you know, I notice and, you know, no shade. I love the work that all these white women are doing on climate emotions. But the vast majority of people on LinkedIn in my network I. And to be fair, I am a white woman too. So that explains some of that. Why is the conversation happening so much around white with white women? Or why are white women so interested in this conversation? What's missing there? It's you know, it's obviously like most issues of equity and access, it's not just about access. It's about the terms of the conversation. It's about, different cultural definitions of what mental health even is. As you mentioned earlier, these other models exists out there. It's not just this one model. Is it the world of mental health? Is it the world of climate? What is what is what do you what do you make of it?
WESTON: Well, you're asking both about the whiteness and the gendered.
RAY: Yes, I'm asking an intersectional question. It's true.
WESTON: I think with respect to the gendered aspect, which is an easier, quicker answer in my view, is that I think for all sorts of reasons, women are associated with care. In, all over the world. And social and political movements are very, very often led by mothers and, wives of sons and men who are, who are dying in wars and or being killed in factories and around child labor and things like that. So in some ways, it follows in the best of that tradition. And it's true, even in the anti-Trump movement or in the anti-authoritarian movement, like huge numbers of these organizations are often led by women. Right. And statistically, who's in the demonstrations? You look at some of the reasons research by Dana Fisher in the Space and talks very much.
RAY: We had Dana Fisher on the show, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
WESTON: And so she can talk to some of that, in terms of its whiteness. Again, there's a couple of complicating factors is that I think if we frame it as climate and mental health, it will draw a certain type of population. That does not mean that there are not huge numbers of people who are neither white nor upper middle class, who are both interested in this issue and address this issue in different forms and in different contexts in different places. And so one of the things that I think is a real misnomer is equating these organizations with the field, how we talk about the field, I don't think that they're the same thing. And I think that's one of the big gaps. And then the question is, why is there that gap?
I think it goes to the heart of what it means to be in the United States, where we keep separating over and over and over issues of racism and class politics from middle class framings of issues. You and I've talked about this before. I think that the framing of climate anxiety was incredibly important. I think it opened an enormous amount of things to see and to connect around and to build around, but it also has narrowed what we look at in very specific ways. And if we're hunting for who's interested in climate anxiety, we are going to be missing the people who have been doing this work for tons and tons of time and doing it in different ways.
So I think our challenge is actually to address the racism and our challenges, to address the sort of binaries that we've set up, as opposed to wondering how come other people aren't interested in this? I think it's the reverse is the issue. And do I have an easy solution to that? No, I think that these schisms and the racism in the movement and the concessions that people have made or the sacrifices people have made to get certain things accomplished, have caused real damage. And so I think it takes a real work on the ground and patience and intentionality and humility and all of the other things, that we need to talk about, but certainly naming it front and center as, as an issue of racism and blindness to the ways in which this work could show up differently for people. Is a key part of that.
RAY: What an invitation. So is there anything you want to add before we wrap up. Are you, have we left anything untouched.
But you know this, we've gone real, we've gone a lot of directions and it's been really fun. I just want to make sure that you feel like it's, you know.
WESTON: I guess I would say that to the extent that you have anybody who's a clinician, I'm listening to this and I hope that there are is that I would really welcome people joining Climate Psychology Alliance and also seeing the whole field as a field for them to join, and ask these questions within the field so it can keep on growing, because we care a lot about having people on the ground all over the country available to address these issues in real time, in real language that people are using on the ground. We are a membership organization, which is what makes me so proud of this organization, and we are not shying away from the intersections, which also makes me very proud of this organization. It needs to be done on the ground. It needs to be done in local communities. We need clinicians who are doing and thinking about how to be in the community around this stuff, because the issues are not going away. So I guess it would be an invitation to anybody who has interest in this to join the organization, to reach out to me. I'll get involved, change it, work on it.
RAY: Yeah. And you also have a directory for people to find climate aware therapists, in case you're not a practitioner, you're looking for actual support. There's that too many, many other resources on your website for educators, for parents, for teachers, for all kinds of people, not just clinicians and people seeking therapy. And I'll certainly put all those things in the show notes, and I'm just so grateful for your time, and I, I don't want to end our conversation, but we'll we'll keep going. We'll keep going. But this is the end of this show today. Thanks, Rebecca.
WESTON: Thank you. Sarah. Bye.
RAY: You've just been listening to my conversation with Rebecca Weston, co-executive director of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. Show notes can be found on khsu.org, I'm Sarah Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
